OK, I think I have this straightened out. The situation was that only my first couple of PixelFed posts showed up in my Mastodon timeline, anything more recent did not. Somewhere along the way, I unfollowed and refollowed my Pixelfed account, to no effect. Today, I went into my Mastodon settings and saw that my Pixelfed follow was “Pending”. I canceled it and followed my Pixelfed account again, and all is well.
I have to say, as something if a social media virgin, I am puzzled by #4. I have never been a Facebook, Instagram or Twitter user. Previous to getting into the Fediverse, the only platform I engaged with that could be considered social media was Reddit, and I left that behind because of the whole brewhaha over third-party clients.
Since finding my way here, I have become an enthusiastic user of Mastodon, Pixelfed and Lemmy. I could not have imagined that it would be easier to acclimate myself and i have not encountered any barriers to entry, or at least I have not recognized any.
Is my experience atypical?
Oh, excellent! I originally started out trying to install WriteFreely with Ngnx, but kept running into problems, so I gave up. Never thought to look in that category - thanks!